bookshop boys

STUART HAMMOND
Age: 25
Shop: The Riverside Bookshop, London Bridge


Why work in a bookshop?

I like to read a lot and it’s quiet. I just see it as a stop gap while I wait for my career in professional skateboarding to take off.

How do you feel about independent shops being gobbled up by the chains?

Shop in the independents, shoplift in the chains.

What book really gets you going?

It changes every day. Maybe The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. Maybe White Noise by Don DeLillo. Or Treasure Island. Or Lolita. Or The Picture of Dorian Gray.

What happens in here? It is pretty quiet. Doesn’t exactly seem a barrel of laughs.

A pigeon flew in here once and we couldn’t get it back out. In the end I had to get an old lady to get rid of it because, frankly, the bird unsettled me. That was sort of humiliating. Another time we had a squirrel come in and mooch about in History for a bit. A mouse once, too. It’s basically like Wind in the Willows in this place.



Posted from Vice Magazine